Adrian woke to sunlight.
Real, golden sunlight streaming through the blinds. The sound of cars drifting up from the street. A dog barking somewhere outside. For a moment, the world was mercifully ordinary.
He sat up, blinking at his apartment. Everything was exactly where it belonged: the couch, the journal on the table, the clock ticking softly on the wall.
And yet…
Something was wrong.
The second hand on the clock ticked backward.
The sunlight from the window bent in spirals across the floor.
And when Adrian glanced at the journal, its cover shifted, faintly breathing.
---
His phone buzzed on the coffee table. He snatched it like a drowning man grabbing a rope, desperate for the familiar glow of its screen.
But when he looked—every contact name was his own.
Adrian. Adrian. Adrian. Adrian.
His reflection on the darkened glass smiled before he did.
He dropped the phone, heart hammering. "No. No, not again."
The room stretched, rippling at the edges, but when he blinked it snapped back. He staggered toward the door, yanking it open—
—and stepped into the Dimensional.
---
The hallway outside his apartment twisted into a ribcage of stone. His neighbor's door warped into a spiral of teeth. Yet when he turned back, his apartment looked perfectly normal again—sunlight, blinds, TV glowing with static.
He tried to go back inside, but the threshold bent away from him. His apartment door elongated, receding like a tunnel no matter how many steps he took forward. He chased it, gasping, until he stumbled face-first into spirals carved into the wall.
The spirals pulsed.
And in them, he saw his mother's face.
He reached for her, tears welling—
—but her face peeled away like paper, curling into black smoke.
---
Adrian ran.
Down stairwells that dissolved into spiral pits. Through streets that flickered between his city and a bone-white void. One second he dodged a passing taxi, the next he was nearly swallowed by a chasm of light. Pedestrians' faces spiraled into static when he passed, whispering his name in voices that weren't theirs.
Adrian. Adrian. Adrian.
He clutched his head, staggering against a lamppost. Its metal twisted soft under his grip, rippling like flesh. He yanked his hand back in horror.
The world wasn't his world anymore.
The Dimensional was here.
Or worse—maybe it always had been.
---
He stumbled to his feet, dizzy, the world pulsing with every heartbeat. He didn't know if he was in his city, the Dimensional, or both at once. His apartment window shimmered in the distance—but so did the spirals, endless and hungry.
Adrian tried to walk toward the city skyline.
But his shadow walked toward the spirals.
And this time, it didn't follow him.
---